(UK) Horden shootings: killer held six gun licences

[iverglas]

31. round and round and round

reasonableness is subjective

Have you READ any decisions of your Supreme Court regarding regulation or restriction or limitation of activities? "Reasonableness" is a fundamental concept in multiple areas of the law: search and seizure, sentencing, commercial regulation ...

Good heavens, the fourth amendment to your Constitution uses the word "unreasonable" in its very text.

There has indeed been backing and forthing on "reasonableness" on your Supreme Court (it seems to have meant different things at different times).

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/lawjournal/issues/volume65/number5/calabresi.pdf
(I'd class this on the right wing of things, so I offer it only for some background, not necessarily agreeing with its opinions. I assume you're as familiar with Lawrence as I am; if not, you may want to look it up.)

The key constitutional issue of the last 100 years has been whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gives the Supreme Court the power to judge de novo the reasonableness of state laws. The high Court answered that question affirmatively in 1905 in Lochner v. New York2 and again in June 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas.3 In both cases, the Court found that the state laws burdened key liberty interests of the petitioners, and placing the burden of proof on the States, the Court held that the States had not succeeded in meeting the burden of showing that its criminal laws were reasonable.4 Under this Lochner/Lawrence approach to substantive due process, a lot of state laws could fall as being
unreasonable.

Happily, for most of the period between 1905 and 2003, the Court has been substantially more restrained in its construction of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, in its landmark decision, United States v. Carolene Products in 1938, the Court announced that most reasonableness review under the Due Process Clause would be done under the rubric of rational basis scrutiny with the utmost deference to legislative judgments.5 ...

... The decision in Lawrence raises many fascinating questions, but perhaps the most urgent one is: What does its overruling of Bowers portend for the future of reasonableness review under the Due Process Clause? Does Lawrence mean that the Roe-era or the Lochner-era is back? There certainly can be no question that rhetorically Lawrence bears no relation whatsoever to Glucksberg. Whereas Glucksberg promised that the power of judicial review would only be used cautiously to protect fundamental rights deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions, Lawrence could be read to suggest that state morals laws that cannot be proven reasonable may be unconstitutional. If one takes the doctrinal language of Lawrence seriously, then the case certainly does seem to signal a rebirth of vigorous Lochner-style substantive due process.15

"Rational basis" is obviously, itself, an appeal to a form of "reasonableness".

For the rest, you have my reply in another thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11725687#post114

and I would prefer not to spread an identical discussion over two threads.